We had a retention knob break today, on a Kitamura 30 taper machine. It tore up some vise jaws, and damaged the taper pretty badly, too. My question is ... Are retention knobs subject to metal fatigue due to repeated stressing (clamping/unclamping)? This machine is about 20 years old, as is the tooling. I have never heard of one failing before this. I'm tempted to replace them all.
Any ideas?
crash